Haviv Rettig Gur, a correspondent with the Times of Israel, joined me this morning. Haviv has been a regular guest of Dan Senor’s on Mondays on his podcast “Call Me Back,” as well as on the Times of Israel podcast “The Daily Briefing.” Haviv is compelling and calm, extremely well informed and blunt. (I should have listened to my friend Stephanie years ago when she recommended him first!):

Audio:

11-22hhs-gur

Transcript:

HH: Joined from Israel by Haviv Rettig Gur. Good morning, Haviv. I greatly appreciate you joining me this morning. Welcome to the Hugh Hewitt Show.

HRG: Thank you for having me, Hugh. It’s good to be here.

HH: Years ago, Stephanie, our mutual friend, recommended that you come on. But I’ve had Ambassador Oren all these years from Israel, and I didn’t think I needed a second. But after listening to you on Dan Senor’s podcast and on the Times of Israel podcast, I said I’ve got to talk to this guy myself. You’re really quite remarkable, Haviv. Will you tell the audience how long you’ve been doing this for? You are with the Times of Israel. You’re their political correspondent, their conflicts correspondent. But give them a little background if it’s the first time they’ve heard you.

HRG: I’ve been in journalism since 2005. I actually got my first job in journalism during the disengagement from Gaza. And mostly, English language journalism. English is my second language, but I spent some childhood years, quite a few in the United States. That’s it. I’m born and raised in Jerusalem, served in the army, pretty much done journalism since college.

HH: I have appreciate your calm but very blunt assessment of everything. And I have seven, eight questions and 33 minutes to do it, so I’m going to get at it. First, your assessment of the hostage release negotiation that is proceeding, that was approved by the cabinet 35-3 last night on the recommendation of the IDF, Mossad and Shin Bet?

HRG: Yes. There are a few things we need to understand about this deal. The first thing, the government voted overwhelmingly. I think it was 35-3 cabinet members voted overwhelmingly to accept it. They voted to accept it, including some people whose initial public reaction, they put out press releases when it was first announced a day or two ago, was to reject it. And the reason was that the commander, the security services that you just mentioned all said that in fact, it would also help Israeli security. We’re talking about getting out the most sensitive of the hostages, children, and their mothers. There was an Israeli demand that was accepted by Hamas. Again, accepted by Hamas doesn’t mean much. We have to see if it’s implemented, but it was accepted by Hamas not to split up families. So far, when Hamas did release a couple of the hostages at the beginning, they left family members inside. They tried to keep as many families as possible as part of the campaign of the government, the pressure campaign, because that’s of course what they’re holding the hostages for. So Hamas…released together, and my assessment is that the great overwhelming, overpowering question hanging over this is that, is will it be easy to get back to the war, because if this is an end to the war, if this is the beginning of a much larger international campaign, then that’s a disaster.

Read More

I have written many times here about the unintended consequences of our actions.  For example, “letting nature grow” has greatly exacerbated the wildfire issues in California – like wise the air pollution regulations that prevent controlled burns.  Well, in such a tradition, here is the latest:

A new research study shows that human behavior, like lockdowns, influences the evolution of COVID-19, leading to strains that are more transmissible earlier in their lifecycle.

And so the lesson remains the same.

Read More

A week or so ago an article appeared by John Blake about the revival of the Social Gospel.  In a nutshell, “Its message: saving people from slums was just as important as saving them from hell.”  The article holds the Social Gospel in contrast on White Christian Nationalism, the former being liberal and the latter conservative.  I say the Gospel is neither, and both movements are using the Christianity for their purposes rather than holding to Christianity as their faith.

Read More

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) joined me this morning to discuss his new best-seller “Unwoke”:

Audio:

11-20hhs-cruz

Transcript:

HH: I’m joined by United States Senator Ted Cruz. His brand-new book is Unwoke, and it’s fabulous. Unwoke is available at Amazon.com. Unwoke is in every bookstore. Unwoke may be in most of the country’s airports, although I don’t know, Senator. Do you think that you’re going to get past the censors at the airport-approved, state-run bookstores?

TC: You know, I’ve got to tell you, Hugh, airports tend to really dislike conservative books. You sometimes have to hunt a little bit harder for conservative books in airports. Boy, they don’t like them.

HH: Unwoke is really a fabulous read, and I made my outline. I read it last week. I made my outline during the Browns game yesterday. It kept getting longer, but I’m going to try and respect your time. It’s a book about cultural Marxism, but this is a moment of anti-Semitism, which is part of cultural Marxism. I want to play for you, Senator, a bit of video and audiotape that I received yesterday, actually Saturday night, from a good friend. I’ve had it corroborated by another person. This happened in Manhattan on Saturday afternoon. Play it for the Senator.

(Crowd chants) Kill the Jews. What do we want? Kill the Jews.

HH: Senator, that is a march of hundreds, if not thousands of people on New York Manhattan streets chanting kill the Jews or kill some Jews. It’s hard to tell. What do you think about that? And I know Chaplinsky, and you know, Chaplinsky, and we know that fighting words are a very narrow exception to the 1st Amendment. Do you think that fits in it?

TC: Well, as a legal matter, I don’t know if it does or not, but I’ll tell you, it’s tragic. I mean, it breaks your heart. And you know, after World War II, billions across the globe committed Never Again, that never again would we allow the kind of horrors that the world saw during the Holocaust, that never again would we allow the mass murder and genocide of Jews. And we are seeing an environment right now where as you just played, there are large numbers of people calling for exactly that. And I think we should take it deadly serious. And on that matter, on October 7th, we saw exactly the horrors that the Nazis carried out repeated by Hamas terrorists. And October 7th, tragically, is the largest single day mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. And yet, for those filled with the evil hatred that you just played, and that we’re seeing in the halls of Congress, that we’re seeing in universities across the country, that we’re seeing in the streets of Europe, for those filled with that hate, it’s not nearly enough.

Read More

My current Sunday School class is going through a series of lectures on the “History of Christianity.”  Yesterday we studied the period just before the Reformation – the period of the plague.  Antisemitism raised its ugly head then.  Half the population of Europe died in the plague and the survivors tended to “blame the Jews.”  In point of fact, a survey of history shows antisemitism coming and going in waves throughout history.  That makes the clip the host played repeatedly this morning of a march through NYC shouting “Kill the Jews” (behind the Hughniverse paywall) as unsurprising as it is horrifying.  But this observation does help us find the cure to this disease that is moving through the nation much faster than covid.

Read More

Thanksgiving approaches and I wonder if the nation is feeling it this year.  Happiness, contentment, thankfulness tend to be a package, as do unhappiness, discontent and ingratitude.  If the media are to be believed we are a nation of discontents – upset about identity, war and climate.  Apparently the “climate crisis” is sufficiently critical for the president to invoke war powers.  There is a crisis of loneliness in the nation, and it is expressing itself in all sorts of odd ways.  Will it be a meaningful Thanksgiving this year?

Read More

As I am writing the post just below, news hit my inbox that is truly stunning.  Apparently, Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” has gone viral starting on TikTok.  That’s a bit chilling.  The response has been for websites to take the letter down, although you can find it if you are an astute user of the internet.  There are really three question that flow from this phenomenon.  One, why does this truly antisemitic document resonate in the fashion that it does.  Two, is its removal from the internet really the correct response.  Three, do you need any more proof that TikTok is just wrong?

Read More

Back in September, I started and occasional series on what it means to be “smart.”  I did not so much define it as I tried to demonstrate that there is a lot more to it than just amassing information or credentials.  In this post I want to look at a couple of characteristics that smart people seem to have in common and talk about the burden that comes with it.

Read More